I’m only familiar with American cinema, like Glory, Clear & Present Danger, and Patriot, just to name a few. Do other nations create these kinds of jingoistic action films? I think I’ve heard of some Chinese ones that were similar.
Yes, China creates a great deal of them. Not sure “all” countries do, but I’m sure numerous ones have similar versions. Russia has quite a few WW2 movies I believe.
There was that whole James Bond thing, saving the West from evil, and postwar Britain from American cultural imperialism.
United Kingdom: Lawrence of Arabia, Zulu, Dunkirk
France: Lucie Aubrac, La grande vadrouille, L’Armée des ombres
Soviet Union: Virtually all films, especially those of Sergei Eisenstein.
Stranger
I’m an idiot. I have of course seen the Bond films but somehow didn’t connect it to the topic.
I suspect some of the Nazi propaganda films from the 30s and 40s would qualify as “action movies.”
Specific to the USSR, there was the book and movie series hailing Stierlitz, their James Bond.
(No sex please, we’re Soviet)
Well, I do know from actual viewing that Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China do. There are a lot of those movies on Netflix.
The closest that I can think of for Japan would be something like Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. The main character is a member of a patriotic, jingoist organization but he’s attracted to an anti-government, pro-terrorism woman so…I’m not sure that it really fits.
Good movie, though.
Japan is constitutionally limited to using its military purely for self-defense. They mostly work like the National Guard, helping out to move people and build temporary structures in disasters. The people are fairly satisfied with the setup.
There are numerous Indian and Pakistani patriotic war movies, probably filmed from slightly different perspectives.
I’m visiting Türkiye at the moment and happen to have walked by a multiplex earlier today and browsed the posters out of curiosity. Many of the movies are American imports (e.g. the Ryan Gosling Fall Guy is called Düblor here, which literally means “stuntman”), but there was one poster that had a Turkish title and cast, with a soldier holding the hand of a little girl and looking at a burning battlefield. Don’t remember the title, but based on this I’m inclined to say “yes” to the OP.
(Türkiye is a wildly nationalistic country. Flags literally everywhere, even more than in the US, followed closely by posters and statues of, and other references to, Attatürk. The cab driver who brought us to our current hotel launched into an unprompted paean to Attatürk’s greatness and his pride in the country’s progress during the drive. So I’d be pretty surprised if “patriotic action movies” weren’t a thing here.)
Türkiye’s Valley of the Wolves franchise fits that bill. To a disquieting degree from this distance.
I’m trying to think of a Canadian war movie. (Our movie industry isn’t very strong, because we’re so close to the US.)
The only one I can think of is Passchendaele.
I don’t know if you would call it a “patriotic action movie.”
Here’s the Wikipedia article. You could read the plot summary and judge for yourself.
Soviet patriotism was a tricky thing, though: a film that really spoke of and to the people and culture got the film censored, shelved, and the director/writer persecuted.
There was a TV movie called The Chronicle of 1812
Paul Gross also did Hyena Road, which I haven’t seen, but googling makes it sound good. Don’t know how patriotic it is.
CBC also did a miniseries on the Dieppe raid, but that wasn’t really “patriotic”, since most people consider the raid a failure.
Eh, sort of, but not always and not exactly. It’s been a long time since I’ve seriously explored Russian film, but here’s what I remember: The Soviets were proud of having a fairly sophisticated film industry and talented filmmakers, and supported efforts to have their best products exported to the world as evidence of Russian superiority. That included some stuff that seemed to Western eyes to be critical of Soviet leadership, history, or politics. But the thing was, those movies and filmmakers were often supported exclusively for international distribution, as a propaganda counter to the idea that the Kremlin was intolerant of criticism; but meanwhile, this kind of work was given limited if any attention internally, exactly because of worries about subversive influence. Basically, it was much more complicated than simply “criticize Kremlin, go up against wall.” (Something similar also happened with Iranian film in the 90s, to a lesser extent.)
I mean there’s numerous Japanese anime that are all patriotic action series, Gate is written by a far-right guy IIRC and is entirely about the Japanese military kicking ass (though against fantasy creatures)
Israel is a very small film market, so it doesn’t make many action movies, and even fewer war movies, and those it makes are almost always of the tragic/futility of war/slice-of-life type. The only overtly patriotic film I can think of is 1979’s Operation Thunderbolt, which was about the 1976 Entebbe raid - and even that one is more of a eulogy to Yonatan Netantayhu than a rah-rah action movie.
Lost me early on, when the bayonet went right through the German’s forehead bone. It should have skittered into his ear or orbital (don’t ask me how I know this - sarcasm -)
Could any Canadian War of 1812 movie surpass Douglas Coupland’s monument ?